Steampunk Road Dispatch

Not exactly a glitch and not quite a thousand ships, but I apologize for inadvertently launching everybody’s vessels in celebration of New Year’s Day.

There is currently no easy way for me to inactivate periodic events, so instead I set them to happen annually at midnight each January 1st, the idea being that just before January 1st I would change the date to July 1st and then change it back soon afterward. To make a long story short, I forgot. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. In the meantime, enjoy the show!

We bid adieu to many of our bot captains today. They should not return. This was an important step to take before bringing the Guild Wars online, because it is no fun battling a bot.

Generally, the more users a game has, the more enticing the game appears to potential new players. There is therefore very little incentive for removing players from the game, even if they are bots. Thus, we did not have a user deletion tool in place until today.

But we have it now, and we were not afraid to use it on those pesky bots. As much as we want everyone to stay a member of Steampunk Road, we do plan to add in the future an option for departing users to request deletion of their accounts.

Members who are also citizens of the Floating City will remember the constant influx of “bot” captains in that game. It appears that the bots have found Steampunk Road as well. Fortunately, they are not nearly as aggressive here as they were there. (Also, they will not hurt your score here like they hurt our score there.)

We know they are bots for a couple of reasons, which unfortunately we will not go into detail here because we do not want whoever is responsible figuring out what tipped their hand. We will tell you that we have taken steps to secure the system, that we have previously taken steps to secure your data, and that we will continue to take steps to improve both the security of the system and the security of your data. In addition, you can expect to see a purging of all or most of the existing bots from the game in the next few days.

We have been creatively cursing at Internet Explorer 10 all day for the fits it has been giving us, particularly with this blog. Ever since we posted our inline survey, the opening page of The Steampunk Road Dispatch has been automatically jumping down to the first option of the survey in IE10. The browser may think it is being helpful, but it is not. To add insult to injury, there is a fine box around our window to the world at the top of the page if you set the zoom to anything larger than 100%. Other browsers do not have these problems.

So it was with great bias that we started looking at another problem having to do with file uploads. The page was working wonderfully under Google Chrome, but essentially doing nothing under IE10. Though it pains us greatly to admit it, IE10 got this one right while Chrome was letting us get away with murder, for the fault lies not in the browsers but in ourselves (and our code). We won’t bore you all with the technical details, but if you do want them then just ask and we will share with those interested individually.

We will apologize to IE10 just as soon as it stops auto-scrolling down to the survey.